


The Hope Only of Empty Men

by Innsmouth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bring your tissues., F/F, Gratuitous sadstucking, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 16:50:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innsmouth/pseuds/Innsmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a shitty night like this, you really couldn't leave anyone stranded beside the highway.</p><p> </p><p>(Two girls, a blizzard, and the fickle finger of fate.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hope Only of Empty Men

 

 

It's a little past nine-thirty when you spot the girl on the side of the road near Oneonta, hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans, gazing off into the blizzard you’ve been struggling through since nightfall.

  
Picking  _anyone_ up is stupid, you know that, especially at night in the middle of nowhere, but  _holy shit_ , she has to be freezing! It's below zero and she's not wearing a coat, so what kind of person would you be if you just left her there?  
  
A huge jerk, that’s what.  
  
You flash your high-beams to get her attention as you pull your dented (you’re totally going to get the front bumper fixed, you swear, but you just....forget) pickup to a stop, mentally crossing your fingers that the bags you’ve bungee-corded to the bed of your truck don’t shift.  
  
Looking back on it, trying to drive from Philly to Canada  _might_ not have been such a great idea.  
  
  
She studies you for a moment before approaching, washed out in the glare of your headlights. You idly drum your fingers on the steering wheel before rolling down the window and poking your head out into the falling snow.   
  
  
“Hi! Need a ride?”  
  
  
“Potentially. Would you happen to be passing Potsdam at any point on your route?” You open your mouth to reply and realize that wow, you have absolutely no idea where that is, so you lean back inside the cab of your pickup, pop the glove compartment, and rummage around until you find the map you picked up three gas stations ago before flicking on the little overhead light to squint at it.  
  
  
Holy  _shit_ that’s a lot of forest.   
  
  
“It’s north from here, fairly close to the Canadian border,” offers a voice from directly outside your window, and the only thing stopping you from jumping a foot up out of your seat and shrieking like a teakettle is your seatbelt and the knowledge that it’s really rude to scream at people you don’t know, because you definitely didn’t hear her walk up.  
  
  
Wow, you’re really out of it tonight!  
  
  
Up close, your possible passenger isn’t threatening at all; just some college-age girl with short blonde hair and huge dark circles under her eyes. So she’s kind of pale and her lips look kind of blue, so what? It’s really cold out tonight, and she’s probably been there a while. Lucky for her you came along or she probably would have frozen to death, and that would have been terrible!  
  
  
“Ummm,” you say, stalling for time as you scan the map again, “…yeah, actually! I’m headed to Ottawa and it’s right on the way, so I can definitely drop you there if you want.” Cue the Award-Winning Jade Harley Smile, which inevitably charms the ever-loving hell out of its target.  
  
Alas, the young lady outside your window remains profoundly uncharmed. Dang!  
No, wait, she’s looking kind of amused – okay, maybe she’s a  _little_ charmed. Hypothesis proven! Nobody can  _totally_ resist you.  
  
  
“If you’re offering, I certainly won’t object.”   
  
  
“It’s not a big deal, really! The door’s unlocked, so c’mon.”  
  
  
“With pleasure.”  
  
  
Occupied as you are with shoving your map back into the glove compartment and tossing an empty king-size bag of Doritos into the backseat to make room, you don’t see her cross in front of your headlights, but then the door is open and she’s halfway in, kicking the snow off her shoes against the step up into the cab. It’s kind of a futile gesture; her legs are caked to the knee anyway.  
  
“Geez, how long were you standing there?”  
  
  
“Long enough. Thanks for stopping.”  
  
  
“No problem! Anybody else would have done the same thing, right?”  
  
  
“You’d be surprised.”  
  
She pulls the door shut, and as she buckles herself in you shift into drive, ease your foot down on the gas, and resume your crawl through the driving snow.   
Your new passenger settles into her seat, and the both of you sit there in silence for a couple of minutes as the radio plays from where you’ve left it turned down low; Joni Mitchell laments that you love your lovin’, but not like you love your freedom. It’s not really a song you like a whole lot, but it’s better than ‘Hotel California’ which you swear to god plays at least twice an hour on like every classic rock station ever.

  
(You didn’t know the lyrics by heart before, but you sure do now.)  
  
  
After a five-song block of Aerosmith, you can’t take it anymore. What’s the point of having a traveling companion if they’re not really companionable?  
You clear your throat and say, in the most chipper tone you can muster in the middle of the goddamn night, “So, tell me about yourself!”  
  
  
And she does tell you; she tells you that her name is Rose, that she graduated from Ithaca as an English major, that she came back home in order to avoid paying rent while she wrote her first novel, that said novel has yet to find a publisher, and that in retrospect she probably should have sucked it up and gone with psychology instead, because at least then maybe she might have had actual job prospects.  
  
Then she listens patiently as you kind of accidentally unload your entire life story, like how you decided to get out of New Zealand for a while and see the world because as much as you love it, it’s still an island, and how cool Thailand had been even if people told you that you had this weird accent that made your Thai almost unintelligible (which totally wasn’t true!), and how you kind of had to gesticulate wildly in Latvia in order to communicate, and how in Croatia you just gave up and hired an interpreter because you guess you’re just awful at languages that aren’t English.   
  
And then you realized that you might as well go all the way to the States as long as you were heading west, so you booked a flight over, saw this shitty pickup advertised for sale in the paper you grabbed when you stopped for lunch in Philadelphia, and decided that hey, a road trip across the continent sounds awesome! But that part’s kind of boring, so you just kind of handwave it.  
  
  
“You’re certainly well-traveled. But why wander the wilds of upstate New York?”  
  
  
You grin. “Why  _not_ wander the wilds of upstate New York?”  
  
  
“Because it’s a godforsaken wasteland composed mainly of forests and ennui.”  
  
  
“Well, what if I like forests?”  
  
  
“What about the ennui?”  
  
  
“I’m not bored yet.”  
  
  
“Then I guess I’ll have to be bored enough for the both of us. It’s a crushing burden, but one that I’ll bear without complaint.”  
  
  
“Because you weren’t complaining just now.”  
  
  
“How dare you insinuate that I was bitching and moaning. I’m mortally offended. Mortally, I tell you.”  
  
  
“Oh noooo, I’m  _so_ sorry! Can you ever forgive me?”  
  
  
“Never. Languish in the purgatory of my contempt.”  
  
  
“Well, shit.”  
  
  
You pull into the parking lot of a 24-hour convenience store somewhere near Lowville, partly because you need something to keep you awake, and partly because you need to wipe fog from the inside of your windshield and flex feeling back into your numb hands.  
That’s weird, though. You could swear you cranked the heat up to blasting—yeah, the dial’s turned all the way to the right. It must be broken, the stupid thing. Come to think of it, you’ve been able to see your breath for a while; Rose must be miserable, but you guess she’s too polite to mention it. Man, you _totally_  feel like a jerk now!   
  
  
When you glance in her direction, there’s still snow caught in her hair.  
  
  
Without thinking, you reach over and run your fingers through to clear it out; surprised, she turns to face you at your touch, and as you hastily pull your hand back it brushes the top of her ear and  _oh man_ , she really  _is_  freezing! You are the  _worst_  getaway driver, it’s you.  
  
  
“Sorry, you kind of had some snow—um, I think the heating died, do you want my coat?”  
  
  
“I think you need it more than I do. You’re driving, after all. It wouldn’t do for you to shiver us into an accident.”  
  
  
That doesn’t seem right somehow, but you decide against pressing the issue and opt instead to jerk a thumb in the general direction of the convenience store. “I’m gonna go get some coffee, do you want anything?”  
  
  
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. Go on, I’m not going anywhere.”  
  
  
“Okay, I’ll be back in five.”  
  
  
You slide down out of your seat and slam the door behind you as you make a beeline for the 7-Eleven or whatever the hell it is. Halfway to the entrance, you turn to look back; Rose is leaning her head against the passenger-side window, watching you with what you guess is maybe amusement, and as you squint against the snow she smirks and waggles the fingers of one hand at you in a sarcastic little half-wave. You stick out your tongue in response, and you can see her trying not to actually smile.   
  
Two minutes has you in and out with your coffee and a few quarters in change, and as you start the engine and get back on your way, you contemplate your passenger and realize that something doesn’t quite add up.  
  
  
“Hey, Rose?”  
  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
  
“What were you doing out there when I picked you up?”  
  
  
“Let’s just say I ran into a little mechanical trouble.”  
  
  
After an awkward pause, it becomes obvious that she’s not going to elaborate, so you change the topic. “So what’s your novel about?”  
  
  
“Not what it should be, according to every publisher I’ve submitted it to. Apparently I’m better suited to penning pretentious nonsense about American expatriates swanning about in Paris, or whatever the current trend in literary fiction is.”  
  
  
“But you didn’t write about that.”  
  
  
“No.” She stretches, shifting in her seat for a better position. “I didn’t write wizard-centric dark fantasy either, which was what I’d originally intended. Instead, I waxed poetic on how no matter how desperately you defy destiny, it inevitably flips you the bird and has its way with you.”   
The window on her side has fogged over again, and she clears it with her sleeve. “My protagonist ended up tearing the universe apart in order to save herself, but it was all for naught. My mother despised it. She said it was far too depressing.”

  
“Well,  _I’d_ read it.”  
  
  
“That makes one of us, I suppose.”  
  
  
The next hour and a half slips by mostly in comfortable silence broken by the occasional brief bit of banter; you pass through Gouverneur and Canton without fanfare, and as you make your way into the outskirts of Potsdam, the both of you are laughing at your impression of a particularly stuffy TSA officer you’d run afoul of when you landed in Philly.  
It takes a few heaving breaths before you can wheeze out a query as to where exactly you should drop Rose off, because she’d never really said  _where_ specifically and you don’t want to leave her by the side of the road again (or at all, which is really silly; after all, you hardly know her).  
  
To your surprise, she looks uncertain for a moment, and hesitates before replying. “Actually, I don’t live in Potsdam proper - I really should have told you before I got in the car. Home for me is about forty minutes out of your way, so you can just drop me at a reasonably well-lit street corne—“  
  
You bulldoze through the tail end of her sentence. “That’s no problem at all! I can totally get you there.”   
  
  
There’s a pause before Rose answers, and you get the sense that she’s choosing her words carefully. “I’d be very grateful if you could do that.”  
  
  
“Sure, it’s no big deal. You’re going to have to give me directions, though.”  
  
  
Rose nods, and soon enough you’re creeping your way through the Adirondacks in the middle of the night while  _really_ hoping that you don’t hit a moose or anything.  
  
The clock on your dashboard reads 2:16 AM by the time you reach your destination. It’s sort of weird to have this huge postmodern monstrosity of a house plopped down in the middle of nowhere, but you guess there’s no accounting for taste.  
  
  
(Okay, it’s  _totally_ weird.)  
  
  
You pull up at the end of the driveway, a short distance from what looks like one of those ostentatious family tombs you sometimes see in the South; okay, that definitely ups the weirdness factor. Maybe it’s a family tradition? It’s kind of small for a bunch of people, though. Huh.  
  
  
Well, whatever. No biggie!  
  
  
You turn to Rose, raising both eyebrows in polite inquiry. “Want me to drive you to the front door? It’s kind of a hike.”  
  
“It’s okay,” she says. “I can walk from here,” and she nods in the direction of the mausoleum.  
  
  
  
Everything clicks then, and your fingers contract into a deathgrip (oh god, that’s too appropriate, that’s  _way_  too appropriate) on the wheel.  
  
  
  
“You don’t really live here, do you?” you venture, deceptively casual.   
  
  
“No,” she says quietly, “not anymore.”  
  
  
The tiny “Oh,” you voice in response sounds more like a small animal being squashed underfoot. But what can you really say to that except ask how it happened, and that would be really rude and probably make things worse, and how  _do_  you talk about that sort of thing, anyway?  
You let your hands drop into your lap as you realize that you’re not as good at this as you’d thought.  
  
  
The silence lingers for a minute or so; then there comes a jolt up your spine and the strong sensation that you’ve punched through the ice on a frozen pond and plunged your arm in to the elbow, and you look down to see that Rose has taken your hand in hers.  
  
  
“If you’re wondering how it happened,” she says, and thank god, you’re not going to have to try and ask her to explain, “I didn’t decide to throw myself from an appropriately lonely mountain peak in a fit of despair. I was never that sort of person.   
  
Instead of a self-induced backflip off of this mortal coil, I simply became yet another victim of misadventure.  
  
“Out of sheer desperation, I’d driven to Oneonta to pitch my godawful little book to a publisher there. They assured me that it looked promising and that they’d get back to me by next week, and heartened by the miniscule chance of finally getting the blasted thing into print, I set off back towards the revoltingly thriving wilderness of the Adirondacks.”   
She shrugs. “Two hours later, I’d skidded on ice in the middle of nowhere, which resulted in my car careening off into the rapidly darkening woods, my back breaking on impact with an extremely robust conifer, and my eventual demise from exposure. I never made it home.”  
  
  
“Oh,” you say again in a very small voice, “I’m really sorry.” And you are, really; you don’t think she deserved it at all.  
  
  
Rose shakes her head, and your hand stings as she runs her thumb over the back of it. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. If anything, it was mine.”  
  
  
“But you can’t blame yourself for something like that!”  


  
She glances out the window; when she speaks again, soft and faltering, she won’t look at you. “I just wanted to go home.”  
  
  
The cold creeps up your arm, and the silence stretches on again until Rose says abruptly, “My mother drove by me once.”   
  
  
“What do you  _mean_ , she  _drove by_ _?_ ”  
  
  
“She never even slowed down. Either she couldn’t see me, or didn’t want to. The same went for every other passing motorist.”  
  
  
“Oh,  _Rose_ , I’m so sorry…”   
  
  
“Me too.” She finally tears her gaze from whatever’s outside her window and turns back to face you. “But for whatever it’s worth, I’m glad that you stopped for me.”  
  
  
“Like I said, it was no problem.” You manage a halfhearted little smile; Rose returns it, and oh  _fuck_ , you’re pretty sure that was your heart breaking.  
  
  
“Thank you,” she murmurs, pulling her hand from yours to brush icy fingers across your cheek, “for both the lift, and for listening.” And then she leans over to kiss you.  
  
  
  
Your lips part easily for her, and she tastes of cold and blood and desolation.  
  
  
  
She tastes of winter, and when you blink she’s gone.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Originally an HSO prompt fill for lattelatte of Team Jade<3Karkat.
> 
>  
> 
> Title is from T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men', because I'm dreadfully pretentious.


End file.
